Big brother is a hot blonde: are Meta glasses the future in women’s safety?
That title caught your attention?
Not to sound like an insane conspiracist, but once again I think the media and surrounding discourse have got it all wrong! What if Meta glasses aren’t the death sentence for women’s privacy that everyone has synonymously decided they are?
What people are leaving out of the conversation is that these glasses can only be used against women when it is a man wearing them. Duh!
When a woman puts them on, the power dynamic changes hands— or faces? Suddenly, the surveillance is working in her favour, she has a witness!
I’m going to be completely honest with you (I mean, to a fault, when am I not!) Lol. Today I wore a low-cut, spaghetti-strap top. The absolute antithesis of a dress-code violation. Ordinarily, I would feel self-conscious walking around London looking quite so busty. Dear God, aren’t my bare shoulders just asking to be licked!? The last time I wore this very top, I felt so painfully aware of the attention it attracted that I wrote an entire blog post complaining about it!
And yet today, flopping around London in my flip-flops and fresh white pedicure, I haven’t felt half as vulnerable or exposed. In fact, I’ve noticed men taking guilty little glances at me before looking away with haste. Why?
Because I am wearing the surveillance on my face!
Everyone knows what Meta glasses look like by now. You can’t escape the media hysteria surrounding them, particularly the stories about their misuse against women. And I understand the fear, I really do. Who doesn’t side with scared women? I am a very scared woman lol. But I’m also here to suggest that perhaps women shouldn’t be afraid of these glasses.
Perhaps we should be the ones wearing them!!
These glasses are only as dangerous as the person wearing them is. Sure, they absolutely have the potential to be a privacy nightmare. But that aside, under a woman’s control they can act as a tool of protection. They watch out for me like a faux boyfriend!
With one covert click, I can take a photograph or begin recording without the overt, conspicuous manoeuvre of pulling out my phone. If a man stares lustfully for too long, follows me, catcalls, or says something he probably wouldn’t want repeated in a courtroom, he can now rest assured there is a reasonable chance his actions are being captured.
This emboldens me with a power I’ve not felt before.
As a hot young blonde piece of ass who flounces down the streets of London —this is kinda revolutionary, no?
All I see are these Meta glasses getting bad press. Women saying they should be banned; that they’re evil little pieces of spyware with no place in public life. And these concerns are completely legitimate. But the power dynamic changes when those same glasses are sitting on a woman’s face, surveying the world around her rather than her.
I don’t understand why people keep leaving this part out.
If a woman can easily and rather secretly capture the face of someone who catcalls her, that is insane innovation for women’s safety and for holding men accountable. If she can record an interaction, she has evidence of something that might otherwise become another humiliating exercise of he said, she said. There is something satisfying about the possibility that a man who has become accustomed to women having no proof of his behaviour might suddenly have to consider the possibility that there is a record of it.
Maybe the media should be telling women this, too.
The world is insane, and I understand why women are frightened of technology. We have very good reason to be when men are using AI to undress us, turn us into porn and get off sexually on the violation of it all. No wonder we are suspicious of technology that has, in its short history, been used against us.
But I think something important gets lost when we start treating the technology itself as the perpetrator. AI isn’t evil. The men misusing it are.
And sure, I hear the argument that much of this new technology has been developed by men, trained on data containing gender biases, because thats the world we live in. Designed within industries that are historically full of objectively weird guys! All of that may be true.
But perhaps that is even more reason for women to start using these technologies rather than surrendering them over to men.
Ladies shouldn’t be the passive subjects of technological change. I want us to get our hands sticky, too!
Maybe I’m insane, but I feel safer wearing these glasses.
I’m still navigating how I feel about wearing them while I use the toilet, and whether I should be worried about letting them see me naked. Lol. On the other hand, I am desperate to have someone wear them during sex so I can watch the POV film of what it looks like to fuck me. As someone who is autosexual, I am admittedly obsessed with this idea. Haha.
Where I see men embracing new technology and women running from it, I wonder whether women are making a mistake by leaving something this powerful for the boys.
I still feel very strongly that AI has no business replacing human creativity. I think it’s fucked how casually people use it to cheat at life, outsource their imagination and deny themselves the pleasure and process of trial and error learning.
However, I’m pleasantly surprised that something I bought largely for the novelty and fun factor has actually made me feel safer. Which is all the more remarkable when the entire world is intent on telling me I should feel the latter.